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Creative Pedagogy of Play – The Work of Gunilla Lindqvist

Monica E. Nilsson Blekinge Institute of Technology

School of Management Box 520

S-372 25 Ronneby Sweden

Phone: +46 (0)708 265221 Fax: +46 (0)457 385607

monica.e.nilsson@bth.se

Abstract:

This paper presents the work of Swedish play scholar Gunilla Lindqvist, particularly what she

calls creative pedagogy of play and play worlds. Creative pedagogy of play is an educational

approach that advocates the joint participation of children and adults in a collectively created and

shared world of fiction -- a play world. Gunilla Lindqvist’s pedagogy is designed to investigate:

(1) how aesthetic activities can influence children’s play and (2) the nature of the connection

between play and the aesthetic forms of drama and literature. Lindqvist bases her own theories

about play worlds on Vygotsky’s theories of art, play, semiotics, imagination, and creativity. Her

main claim is that children develop consciousness through dialogical interactions with adults and

peers when they are encouraged and invited to play in a fictitious world where reality and

imagination are dialectically related. This paper pays homage to her work and attempts to present

her writings in an appreciative and expository fashion.

Key words: Aesthetics of play, imagination and creativity, creative pedagogy of play, play

world.

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Introduction

The work of Swedish play scholar Gunilla Lindqvist not only contributes to theories of play and

early childhood pedagogy design, but also provides new perspectives on Vygotsky’s cultural-

historical theories of human development. According to Lindqvist, Vygotsky was successful in

developing a cultural-historical theory of human development because he initially studied the

relationship between humans, art, and literature. According to Lindqvist (1995), Vygotsky’s

cultural-historical theory on cultural signs is a direct continuation of his aesthetic theory in

Psychology of Art (1925/1971). In Creativity and Imagination in Childhood (2004), his ideas on

art are tied together with his general thinking (Lindqvist, 1995). Vygotsky described how we

create our conceptions (i.e., how we interpret and express our understanding of the world).

Vygotsky described this process as a dialectical relationship between reproduction and

production (creativity). The latter, which he calls imagination, is a significant concept in

Lindqvist’s work.

Lindqvist builds on Vygotsky’s theory of play, which, as she points out, is a theory of

play as a creative activity. Lindqvist wants to reinterpret Vygotsky’s play theory, asserting that

his theory is best understood through his original thoughts in The Psychology of Art and his

inquires into creativity and imagination as the two basic types of activity (Vygotsky, 2004, p. 7).

According to Lindqvist, Vygotsky’s ideas give rise to a creative pedagogical approach. She calls

her contribution to such an approach Creative Pedagogy of Play and Play Worlds (Lindqvist,

1995). She investigates how aesthetic activities can influence children’s play as well as the

nature of the connections between play and the aesthetic forms of drama and literature. Creative

pedagogy of play is a pedagogical activity for daycare centers, preschools, and schools where

children and adults co-participate in a jointly created and shared world of fiction -- a play world.

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My intention with this paper is to give a window into Gunilla Lindqvist’s thoughts and

ideas on play, creative pedagogy of play, and play worlds. For this purpose I have interviewed

and corresponded with Jan Lindqvist and two of Gunilla Lindqvist’s former students (Annica

Löfdahl and Inga-Lill Emilsson), both presently holding positions as faculty members at the

University of Karlstad.

Until recently, Gunilla Lindqvist was a professor of education at the University of

Karlstad in Sweden. At the turn of the millennium, Lindqvist became afflicted with severe

dementia. At the age of 66, she is now hospitalized and unable to work.

Lindqvist’s background is in education, philosophy, and sociology. She held a position at

the University of Lund before moving to the University of Karlstad in 1975. Gunilla Lindqvist

introduced several of Vygotsky’s works in Sweden by having them translated into Swedish. For

example, Imagination and Creativity in Childhood, which was written in 1930, was translated

and published in 1995 in Sweden. Before that Vygotsky’s work had only been translated into

Italian in 1972. In 1999 Lindqvist organized translations and publications of Vygotsky’s

textbook Educational Psychology, which was first published in 1926.

Gunilla Lindqvist’s theory was developed in close collaboration with her husband, Jan

Lindqvist, who also held a faculty position at the University of Karlstad. His field was drama and

language/literature. Jan Lindqvist describes the theory of creative pedagogy of play as the fruit of

his and his wife’s combined interests and experiences in developmental psychology, education,

literature, and drama.

Gunilla became particularly interested in Vygotsky’s work on art, imagination, and

creativity, which was, according to Jan, a result of Jan and Gunilla’s close collaboration and

continuous conversations and discussions. As an anecdote, Jan describes how he used to play

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with their son—applying his dramatic skills—and how his wife became intrigued by this. A

tradition was established where Jan used to read Vygotsky’s texts out loud while Gunilla did her

interpretations by jotting down comments and ideas in a note book. This, Jan explains, was the

beginning of Gunilla Lindqvist’s play theory (hereafter Lindqvist refers to Gunilla Lindqvist).

A Cultural Approach to Play

Lindqvist (1995), like Vygotsky, asserts that children play in order to satisfy needs and motives.

Thus, play is not about pleasure or surplus energy, which was a common belief at the time of

Vygotsky’s research and is still a commonly held view. Play, according to Vygotsky, is a

complex phenomenon that entails higher mental processes of cognition, volition, and emotion.

Moreover, Vygotsky perceives play as the most significant source for children’s development of

consciousness about the world. He states,

Play is the source of development and creates the zone of proximal development /…/ (in play) a child always behaves

beyond his average age, above his daily behavior; in play it is though he were a head taller than himself. (Vygotsky, 1981)

Play, according to Vygotsky (1981) is a dynamic interplay between the child’s inner

world (thoughts and feelings) and the external world. Play creates a fictitious situation in which

actions can be carried out. Thus, children’s play is imaginative; that is, play is a creative process

of interpretation in action where, through fantasy, a real situation is given a new and different

meaning (Lindquist, 1995). Meaning dominates play and is the focal point in the dynamic

between idea and action. Because play acts out meaning, play reflects reality in a deep sense and

cannot be confused with a realistic performance of an action. A child’s capacity to create an

imaginary or fictitious situation in play makes play a vehicle for developing abstract thinking.

Following Vygotsky, Lindqvist asserts that play is also about pleasure. Play is

pleasurable in at least two ways: (1) In play a child follows “the law of least resistance,” that is, a

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child does what he or she wants to. However, during play, children also follow the “greatest

resistance law” by subordinating to rules so that the distance from spontaneous input seems to

constitute the road to optimal satisfaction in play. This is a paradox according to Vygotsky

(1981, p. 173). The form of play (the rules) and the master of the form of play seem to give a

child pleasure and excitement. In play a child is capable of mastering her actions and remaining

independent of adults. Lindqvist (1995) makes a connection between this and Vygotsky’s (1971)

writings about art, aesthetical emotions, and reactions. Lindqvist states that play, as well as art, is

an aesthetical form capable of producing an aesthetic emotion. This emotion is different from

real emotion, which has the capacity to create new and complex actions, as well as transcend

everyday actions and influence the course of events.

Vygotsky described (2004) how creativity includes processes of transformation,

exaggeration, and shrinkage. These are also features of play. Lindqvist (1995) writes that

according to Vygotsky, dramatic and literary forms dominate a child’s creative processes.

Drama, according to Vygotsky, is related to play. Thus, play has a close affinity to art. Both

activities contain two coexisting levels: a “real” level -- where the action is carried out -- and a

“conditional” level, where the situation is deliberately fictitious. The trick is to keep these two

levels alive simultaneously: to be in the fiction and to know it is fiction, and to control the

duplicity in the actions. This gives play particularly rich semantic content.

Lindqvist (1995) is critical of how Vygotsky’s successors, mainly Elkonin and Leontiev,

came to interpret his theory of play. According to Lindqvist (1995), Vygotsky emphasized,

contrary to Elkonin and Leontiev, the dialectics expressed through the relation between the adult

world and the child’s world and also between the will and the emotion. She writes that Leontiev

does not see any tension between the adult’s world and the child’s world and that play, for

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Leontiev, is about a child’s inability to acquire adult roles. When a child cannot perform adult

actions he instead creates a fictitious situation. Lindqvist writes that for Leontiev, this situation is

the most significant sign of play. Play is thus a sign of children’s inferiority, and hence play is in

fact an infantile activity because, as Lindqvist states, from this perspective, children will

gradually grow into the adult world and play is directed toward the future (ibid). Moreover, she

claims that the implication is a stress on reproduction (of adult roles) at the expense of creativity.

Therefore, Lindqvist attempts to reinterpret Vygotsky’s play theory, based on his original

thoughts in The Psychology of Art, and his inquires into creativity and imagination. According to

Lindqvist, Vygotsky’s ideas give rise to a creative pedagogical approach instead of an

instrumental one. This is because Vygotsky shows how children interpret and perform their

experiences by creating new meaning and how emotions characterize their interpretations (i.e.,

how emotion and thought unite in the process of knowledge construction).

Based on Vygotsky’s theories, Lindqvist argues for a cultural, rather than a

psychoanalytical or cognitive, approach to play. Psychoanalytical and the cognitive approaches

disregard the significant role of adults in play. Either a child confirms his or her knowledge

through play (cognitive approach) or processes inner conflicts (psychoanalytical approach). In

both cases it is assumed that children should be left alone in their play and that adult support

should only be offered passively by providing play material, etc. Instead, Lindqvist (1995)

argues that in order to describe the relationship between play and culture, there is a need for a

comprehensive cultural theory of play. Thus, for Lindqvist it is important to search for a

perspective on culture that makes it possible to understand and explain the dynamic connection

between play and culture. As a consequence, Lindqvist opposes a clear-cut distinction between

the concept of culture in an anthropological sense and culture as fine art. These two

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conceptualizations can and should be combined and thus transcended (1996) in order to

understand the connection between play and art forms such as dance, music, lyrics, and drama.

Understanding culture in this way would impact our understanding of play.

Lindqvist’s theory of play and her creation of an alternative pedagogical activity indicate

a critique of present practices is preschools and schools, a topic that is explored further in the

next section.

Critical of School and Preschool

The Swedish preschool1 has a reputation of being progressive and child centered. Despite

rhetoric that play is important and that “free play” is a staple of Swedish pre-schools, play is not

practiced as much in the Swedish pre-school as one would expect. Lindqvist asks why this is so.

Instead of respecting and emphasizing children’s play, activities in preschool classes tend to

revolve around daily routines as well as efforts to teach “adult knowledge” and norms to the

children. Lindqvist’s explanation for this situation is that the preschool pedagogy is not built on a

cultural and aesthetical view, but rather on psychological theories where art and culture are not

emphasized because the creative subjects are given a subordinated role. The Swedish preschool

is founded on a psychology-based theory where play is considered a solitary activity for children

-- a psychology devoid of societal and cultural context. Thus, Lindqvist is not only critical of

preschools specifically but of schools more generally. Her main concern, though, is preschool,

which she claims is an institution controlled by time and order. The linear way of perceiving

time is in conflict with a child’s subjective experience of time and space. Using linear time to

organize preschool activities reveals an implicit view on childhood: that it has no value in and of

1 The Swedish childcare system is public and the municipalities are obliged to provide childcare. Childcare at the preschool level

is offered to children from age 1 to 5. Preschool class is provided to children from age 5 to 6. School begins when the child is

aged 6 to 7. Leisure time centers are available for children in elementary school.

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itself and that it is just a step on the way to adulthood. She argues that adults who manage

preschools feel that order protects children from what adults consider chaos, anarchy, lack of

direction, and unpredictability. . Instead of managing order and time, Lindqvist asserts that the

teacher’s task should be to make the students interested in the unknown, to make the familiar

unfamiliar, and to facilitate new interpretations and meaning making. Children and young people

need to perceive their reality from different perspectives in order to avoid belief in unambiguous

truths. They need to be creative. Lindqvist’s recipe is an aesthetical view on pedagogy. She

argues for a pedagogy uniting consciousness, playfulness, and solidarity. Lindqvist (1995)

claims there is a need for a comprehensive theory about the role of the aesthetical subjects in

child development and an approach to play where the relationship between imagination and a

child’s abstract thought processes is the focus of attention. Lindqvist’s pedagogical activity (i.e.,

the creative pedagogy of play) is such an approach.

Creative Pedagogy of Play

Creative pedagogy of play is the result of an inter-disciplinary collaboration and the mixing of

fields such as drama, literature, music, dance, art, and pedagogy. Compared to the traditional,

fragmented way of applying aesthetical subjects in Swedish educational settings (c.f., Aulin-

Gråhamn, et al., 2004, Marner, 2009), Lindqvist advocates for a holistic approach. She wants the

entire activity in the preschool and school to be based on a cultural approach.

According to Lindqvist (1995), there seemto be two aesthetical forms of play2. The first

form is connected to music, poetry, and rhythmic movement. This form begins with a young

child’s poetic and rhythmic relationship to objects and language. The second form is connected

to literary forms and originates from the basic pattern in folktales. This form can be found in

2 Lindqvist uses the Swedish term for “pattern” to describe these two forms of play. Hakkarainen & Bredikyte

(2009, p. 4) describes it in terms of “two basic models of artistic reflection of reality in play.”

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children’s play and stories starting at the age of three and is also found in children’s literature.

The plot dominates in this aesthetical form of play. The two forms constitute a basis for the

didactical activity of Lindqvist’s creative pedagogy of play.

In her publications (1989, 1992, 1995, 1996, 1996b, 2000, 2001, 2001b, 2002), Lindqvist

provides rich and concrete examples of creative pedagogy of play projects. The projects (which

could last for up to a year) are always based on a theme important in children’s lives, for

example, fear, marginalization, and racism. Lindqvist collaborated with pre-schools, daycare

centers, leisure-time centers, museums, and schools. The projects were often intergenerational,

allowing younger children to observe older children's theatrical abilities and to develop their own

conscious dramatizations.. Adult participation is also crucial.

A project from the aesthetic form of children’s play that Lindqvist calls “music, poetry,

and rhythmic movement,” is about rhyme. Lindqvist explains (1995) that the tension between

fantasy and reality can be found in the ability of rhyme to fortify a child’s understanding of

reality. Deviations in the rhythmic patterns strengthen a child’s knowledge about reality because

these deviations contrast with what the child is expecting to hear, and thus enhancing a child's

ability to image new combinations. Lindqvist reasons that it is through imagination that children

secure their understanding of the world and reality. Conscious deviations from, or breaks with,

reality can be found in nursery rhymes, as well as in play and art. That is, the discontinuity

between an object and its features gives an object new meaning (i.e., imagination). Lindqvist

(1995) emphasizes the significance of “anarchistic” rhymes and poems. These kinds of writing

question order, turn things upside down, and create a sense of magic. This sense of magic is

important for children who feel inferior and live in a “dangerous” world. Most of Lindqvist's

projects are built on dramatizations of a play world.

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Play Worlds

The aesthetic form of play that Lindqvist (1995) discusses in terms of literary forms -- such as

folktale and children’s literature -- has three important concepts: (1) the play world, (2) the

narrative/plot, and (3) the characters. A play world is a collectively created and shared world of

fiction that children and adults work together to make. A playworld combines a child’s holistic

emotional experience with an aesthetical relation to reality (Hakkarainen, 2004). In order to

create a shared play world, adults create figures, characters, and a plot. The plot is developed

with the children as well. The adults get inspiration from contemporary and classic literature.

The idea is not to take a book and then perform it, but to let the book inspire the creation of a

playworld where children and adults can play together. Using a story from a book provides

children and adults with a common experience to help them understand each other more quickly

and it allows them to enter into the world of the story or fairy tale.

Building up a playworld is a long process where play is the center, not the result. The

process goes through different phases such as creating roles and characters, researching and

bringing out the foundation for the playworld, and creating the story’s plot. The play

environment is important but it is through the physical presence of living characters that the

playworld comes alive.

In her publications, Lindqvist describes a variety of drama and play projects where

playworlds are created. One of the projects, which was the basis for her thesis (1995), was called

Loneliness and Togetherness. It was built around a theme of fear. Two characters were created.

One was a boy, Rasmus, and the other was Fear. The play world began with a scene in which

Rasmus is scared of what is hiding under his bed when he tries to go to sleep. Fear (the sense of

fear personified) was lying under the bed. In the encounter between Rasmus and Fear it was clear

that both of them were scared, but Fear was more frightened than Rasmus. Fear ended up next to

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Rasmus in the bed and Rasmus asked if she feels better now that they were together and next to

each other. Fear was not entirely convinced that she was safe and therefore asked the children if

this place was a safe place. The children answered yes. Rasmus and Fear continued to perform

and explore fear by expressing thoughts and emotions connected to fear. For example, they

decided that it was possible to take a ride on a ghost train passing monsters, ghosts, and other

scary creatures. When Fear visited the preschool next time she brought scary things such as

(artificial) snakes, spiders, and rats.

Lindqvist (1995) explains what happened in the fear-theme play world. There was a

dynamic relationship built between the children and the emotion of fear. This emotion was

performed as having a dual nature -- fear is both the inner experience of being scared and

external objects that produce fright. There were two important relationships in the play. The first

was the relationship between Rasmus and Fear. These characters shared with each other their

desire to control their fear. The second important relationship was between Fear and the children,

who had a decisive role in the plot. The children's role was to call Fear out from under the bed

and to make her visible. The adults acted out the characters of Rasmus and Fear and it was the

children's role to be supportive toward these characters. In this way, the children became

participants and created a common world of fiction. It was the emotion of Fear that created

meaning for the situation. Even Rasmus’ bed had been permeated by Fear. The children played

in and under the bed for several weeks, Lindqvist (1995) notes, as the bed was charged with the

meaning of Fear.

Lindqvist (1995) argues that one could perceive the character Fear to be a metaphor for

the dynamic relationship between imagination and reality. The inner emotion is taking shape and

in that way the individual (emotion) and the social (the materialized) components unite within

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the same body. In order for imagination to develop, a relationship between the internal emotion

and the external world must be established. According to Lindqvist, this is how Vygotsky

describes the process of imagination -- as a dynamic between image making and materialization.

The performance of Fear is appealing to the children because it addresses their real-life concerns

and issues. The children’s emotions are touched, and it is their interpretations and imaginations

that move the story forward. In addition, their interpretations are a precondition for the play to

develop. Lindqvist connects this to Vygotsky’s (1971) statement that art is the emotion’s social

form, which she states is obvious in the play about Fear. In turn, the play about Fear is about the

emotion in a double sense since it is an emotion that is being expressed.

The Finnish-Swedish author Tove Jansson’s tale Who Will Comfort Toffle? and the play

world that Lindqvist organized around this story introduced another perspective. In this story

loneliness is depicted as the feeling of being worthless and denied an existence. In the tale the

children encountered a world filled with meaning. It was a world where a struggle was taking

place for the freedom and the right to exist as small, scared, and different. It was a world where

fear was embedded in life and where the characters’ kindness created the basis for

companionship and tolerance. In this imaginative world the children experienced Toffle’s fear

when he encountered Groke in the fictitious woods (which were copied from the book onto a

plastic sheet with a felt-tip pen and displayed on the wall). On their daily outdoor field trip, they

also got to meet and interact with Toffle and Groke who were personified by their preschool

teachers. Once there, they found a message enclosed in a bottle asking for help from someone

called Miffle, who later became Toffle’s best friend.

Lindqvist (1995) explains that Who Will Comfort Toffle? was structured in a way that

generated play among all the children. According to Lindqvist, the aesthetical form of the book

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played a role in making it possible to dramatize the characters and the plot from the book. Thus,

the dramatic enactment gave life to the plot so that the children could enter into the Moomin

Valley where Toffle and Miffle were, influencing the dialogue between the main characters. The

tension between threat and companionship in the story allowed for a dynamic plot and enabled

imagination and play to thrive. The younger children interpreted this tension in terms of hunting

and thrill. The older children decided to chase after Groke, engaging in advanced play together

with the adults. When Groke eventually became their friend, the children realized that they had

an influence on Groke, which made it difficult to distinguish her as either a good or evil

character.

Lindqvist (1995) gives some advice about creating playworlds. It is important that the

adults’ “performance” is carried out as a dialogue with the children. Too often and too easily

adults dominate the play world they are hoping to create. However, as Lindqvist shows, acting

out a role enables adults to discover new ways of relating to their children, ways that are less

formal and framed by institutional traditions. Being in a role gives teachers a sense of freedom,

Lindqvist writes (1995), and further, “to be in role liberates the teachers from the traditional roles

and the institutional language game so linked to the teachers’ role in preschool and school” (p.

264, my translation).

Moreover, it is important to choose narratives where children can easily move in and out

of roles. The narrative should be open, giving the children opportunities to follow the plot and

influence the story. Children should be given opportunities to influence the story through explicit

actions but also by choosing and reflecting on different alternatives. The children should gain a

critical, creative approach and thus the situations and roles should be contradictory. In this way

the children are given the chance to be authors, directors, actors in and of the playworld.

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Lindqvist (1996) lists the following as the most important results of her empirical studies of

playworlds:

• A shared Playworld supports the development of children’s play. There is a need to

create a cultural context that the children and the adults can relate to in their joint play.

The joint fantasy “world” must also be physical – a real play environment.

• In order for the plot to develop, there is a need for rich content -- a theme that

emotionally touches the participants and that is interesting to the children as well as the

adults. Children often have a dramatic relationship with their surroundings in that their

narratives and play contain basic conflicts.

• The basic conflicts have to be woven into a dramatic text, otherwise the joint play runs

the risk of being reduced to a simple “game of tag,” lacking a plot or intrigue. It is the

dramatic quality of the text that determines if the joint play will develop. Thus, there is a

need for literary texts with multiple possibilities for interpretation.

• Adults need to dramatize the plot in order for the play to develop. In particular, when

acting in dialogue with the children, it is the adults’ characters that give life to the play

and push the children into the fiction. The teachers become mediators and challenge the

children’s zone of proximal development. (pp. 82 - 83, Lindqvist's italics, my

translation).

Conclusion

Gunilla Lindqvist’s work is innovative and challenging in several ways. She is critical of

traditional play theories, which separate and emphasize either emotion or cognition but fail to

account for the significance of culture in play. Culture, for Lindqvist, goes beyond the dichotomy

of culture as defined within the fine arts and anthropology. She searches for a connection

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between play and culture where artistic forms such as movement, sound, and drama are natural

and original components.

She is critical of the way play has been theorized in cultural-historical activity theory,

particularly as Leontiev and Elkonin have presented it. She presents a unique and at times

controversial interpretation of Vygotsky’s work on play theory. Through her own play theory she

illuminates aspects of Vygotsky’s work, particularly the significance of imagination and

creativity, that until recently not been emphasized in CHAT research. In this regard she is an

innovator ahead of her time.

Lindqvist's reinterpretation of Vygotsky’s play theory has an expressed purpose of

designing, implementing, and studying a pedagogy in which adults assume a creative approach

to children’s play. Such a theory of play opens up doors to novel interpretations as well as novel

designs for pedagogical activities and tools. Thus, her reinterpretation of play theory --

particularly her emphasis on the creative quality of play expressed through the design and

implementation of her “pedagogy of creative play” -- paves the way for a cultural approach to

play that can guide practice in preschools as well as schools. Her theory ascribes adults with an

active role in the creation of playworlds. Her reinterpretation, with its emphasis on creativity, is

unique among contemporary Western European and American theories of play (Ferholt &

Nilsson, forthcoming).

In times like the present, when learning is approached in terms of preparation and

training for tests, Lindqvist’s work is provocative and liberating. Her pedagogy values children’s

needs and interests, not just the needs of adult educators to promote children’s learning and

development in terms of adult-determined developmental goals, which colonizes children’s play.

Instead of perceiving adult knowledge, experience, or developmental stages as the teleology of

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children’s play, which is common in Western European and American theories of play (Ferholt

and Nilsson, forthcoming), Lindqvist stresses that play is beneficial to children’s present and

future lives. She prefers to talk about meaning making and development of consciousness rather

than learning and cognitive development (1995).

Some readers may be wondering, if Lindqvist's work is so brilliant, why hasn't her theory

and pedagogy received the recognition it deserves? One explanation might be that, due to illness,

Lindqvist’s career as a researcher was very short (her thesis was completed in 1995 and she

became ill in the beginning of 2000). Another reason might be that developmental effects in

children were not studied systematically in the playworlds (Hakkarainen & Bredikyte, 2009).

Instead, Lindqvist focused her research on understanding the connection between play and

culture (mainly drama and literature) in order to develop a creative pedagogy of play.

Nevertheless, some of these gaps are starting to be filled. For example, Baumer et al., (2005)

shows that playworlds promote narrative competence. Rainio (2007; 2008) shows how

playworlds endorse agency. Hakkarainen (2004) shows how playworld activities encourage

competence in problem-solving.

Lindqvist’s work has also inspired the development of different kinds of playworld

projects. Each unique project is shaped by the socio-cultural conditions of the participants.

Teams in Finland, Japan, USA, Serbia, and Sweden are currently (both separately and in

conjunction) setting up playworld projects for investigation (c.f. Ferholt, 2009, forthcoming;

Ferholt & Lecusay, forthcoming a, forthcoming b; Ferholt & Nilsson, forthcoming; Hakkarainen,

2004; Hofmann & Rainio, 2007; Marjanovic-Shane, et al, submitted; Miyazaki, 2005a, 2005b,

2008; Nilsson, 2008, submitted; Rainio, 2007, 2008a, 2008b). What these studies have in

common is that they build on Lindqvist’s play theory and test her pedagogy, but they also strive

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to develop and go beyond what Lindqvist created. One main interest is to deepen the

understanding of the role of imagination and creativity in human conduct and the relationship

between cognition, emotion, and the body. By performing playworlds of different kinds these

studies also evoke new questions, such as how to recognize and appreciate children’s diverse

everyday cultures -- for example, peer cultures, as discussed by Lindqvist’s former student

Annica Löfdahl (2009), or popular media culture (Nilsson, submitted), which are both significant

aspects of children’s lives. Hence, the legacy of Lindqvist’s work is beginning to make its mark.

Her work inspires and challenges our understanding and interpretation of socio-cultural and

cultural-historical theory in general and Vygotsky’s work on play in particular. This in turn

comes with implications for the development of meaningful activities for children, youth, and

adults.

References

Baumer, S., Ferholt, B., & Lecusay, R. (2005). Promoting narrative competence through adult-

child joint pretense: Lessons from the Scandinavian educational practice of playworld.

Cognitive Development, 20, 576-590.

Egan, K. (1989). Teaching as storytelling. An alternative approach to teaching and curriculum

in the elementary school. University of Chicago.

Elkonin, D. (1988) Legens psykologi. (The psychology of play.) Copenhagen: Sputnik.

Ferholt, B. (2009) Adult and child development in adult-child joint play: The Development of

cognition, emotion, imagination and creativity in Playworlds. Unpublished doctoral

dissertation, University of California, San Diego.

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Ferholt, B. (forthcoming) Synthetic-analytic method for the study of Perezhivanie: The

application of Vygotsky’s method of literary analysis to playworlds. In Mind, Culture,

and Activity: Special Issue on Play.

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